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Navani reaches the laboratory and finds it less wrecked than the first spanreed had made her fear, and more terrible than she had hoped — two scholars dead, the room ruined, the smell of smoke hanging in air she has not had to breathe in years. The two dead are Nem and Talnah, lensmaker-astronomers she had set quietly to study the strange dark sphere Gavilar had once treated as the most important of his collection — the Voidlight-glowing one she had taken back from Szeth. The sphere is gone, the equipment lost, thousands of broams of work scattered across the floor as glass. She has, somehow, caused this herself by setting two women on a question. She lets Rushu sweep the wreckage first — she has never known a fabrial or sphere to detonate — then walks the broken glass in herself; *five sheets,* she notes, *for two corpses.* She tells Rushu to seal the room and catalogue every scrap, every cracked beaker, every page. The ardent, for once, will not get distracted. Then she walks toward the holding room for the mute man who delivered the ruby — sending for a Radiant who might see the spren on his shoulder — because the tower has been off for too many weeks now and she has lost her patience for not knowing what is in her own house.

Below the basement, the climb has run on for hours. Venli keeps time on the Rhythm of Peace and on Timbre's steady inner beat; in envoyform she is weaker than the stormforms around her, and Raboniel sets a pace nobody is allowed to break. At last shaped stone in the tunnel walls, light at an intersection ahead, and the lumps of guards killed silently by the Deepest Ones — and the door opens from inside. Venli pushes forward in time to see the cost in the basement chamber: human scholars in dresses, priests in robes, a few soldiers, mostly dropped without a cry under hands of stone reaching up from the floor. Some are still alive, held down while phantom carapace fingernails open their throats one at a time. The wide pillar at the centre is a column of a thousand gems. Raboniel crosses through the blood to it, lays her hand on its cold crystal, and tells the Sibling to sleep on. Voidlight crawls visibly down her arm and into the column. Venli thinks to the Rhythm of the Lost — *please, no more killing.*

Across the city, Kaladin and Teft slide into Adolin's usual corner booth in the winehouse with their orange drinks, and it occurs to Kaladin how long it has been since he last did anything social without Adolin pulling him into it. Teft toasts to *unfairness* — orange, every time, for both of them. Syl zips in, then Rlain in warform — the room quiets at the sight of him, *the savage that Dalinar tamed* and other neighbours' poison — and he crosses to them with the over-exaggerated smile he wears for nervous humans. Kaladin apologises, at last, for what Bridge Four had done in the chasms making carapace armour out of fallen listeners. Rlain accepts it. Syl, sitting in a tiny Bridge Four uniform a shade bluer than the rest of her body, pushes back on *it was war*: people do not have to kill each other, she says, and shrinks down. Rlain turns to a slower cadence and asks about Dabbid — has been at the fields lately, drifting, faded away again. They settle the question of whether Dabbid needs the new program and whether Kaladin does too. *Has it helped you?* Rlain asks, gently. Teft gives Kaladin the flat stare. *Fine,* Kaladin says — he'll come to the next meeting; he had been thinking about it anyway. *Strength before weakness.* He admits to himself, for once, that the weakness in him is not the disgrace; it is the very thing that lets him help people no one else can. Syl glows a fraction brighter on his shoulder.

Back in the basement, the pillar fights. Raboniel stands rigid and luminous with Voidlight; the gem-column answers with its own white-green-blue radiance — the tower is resisting — and an alarm starts up in the corridor as a hundred stormforms push out to take the first fight. Raboniel does not move. Then the Voidlight crosses over and settles into an embedded grouping of garnets in the pillar's flank. Raboniel sags. Venli catches her and they sit attuned to the Rhythm of the Terrors as the cries in the corridor go on. *Is it done?* Venli asks. Raboniel nods, rights herself, and gives the order to the rest of the force: signal the shanay-im; the tower's defences are theirs now, and the Radiants will not be able to fight. Take the city.